


City of Roots

by pendrecarc



Category: The Divine Cities Series - Robert Jackson Bennett
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 08:20:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13050165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendrecarc/pseuds/pendrecarc
Summary: The divine child Sempros breaks the world apart, knits it back together, and scatters the leftover pieces to the wind.One of them falls in Ahanashtan.





	City of Roots

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Clocketpatch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clocketpatch/gifts).



The divine child Sempros breaks the world apart, knits it back together, and scatters the leftover pieces to the wind, letting them fall where they may.

One of them falls in Ahanashtan, in a small crack in the pavement outside the glittering train station. It waits there a day and a night as the world is turned upside down, as infants and fools and clever young women and wise old men find that their hands suddenly remember how to pluck the strings of a harp with such aching beauty that anyone listening will stop in their tracks and weep until they drown in their own tears. As their feet suddenly discover the way to step so lightly that they can dance on the breeze, and they climb so quickly and so high that the air goes thin and their lungs can scarcely catch it, above the clouds where everything is cold and sharp and bright.

It waits there as rivers burst into song and children speak languages long dead, as hot coals turn to ice when a young woman with bright green eyes breathes on them and rough scarves of homespun wool turn to heavy lumps of homespun lead when a middle-aged man with a bad back snaps his fingers. As all this happens, that little forgotten piece of the divine waits like a seed fallen on freshly-tilled soil, watered with the shock and fear and delight of the small miracles springing up all around it.

And it begins to grow.

It puts out roots beneath the chrome and steel and concrete of the new city, creeping down and out until it reaches fresh, good soil. It sends thin, tender shoots into the air; some are trampled underfoot, some are choked by the fumes from the rail engines, but some survive to catch the first rays of sunlight on the morning after the world is remade. These are warmed, fed, and heartened, and they begin to put out leaves.

A woman who keeps a window garden on the thirtieth floor of her high-rise downtown takes a small clipping from one of the vines that have begun to creep out from the original seedling. She plants the clipping, waters it, and wakes the next morning to the sunrise filtering green through gossamer-thin leaves and a gentle, sweet-smelling breeze on her face; the window glass has been ground to sand by the slow, steady spread of vegetation, and the outer walls of her apartment have become a living, breathing thing, as though the vines have been left to grow wild for a hundred years rather than a single night.

A man walking into the train station on a long journey brushes past the vines, and flecks of pollen cling to the hem of his trousers. He sleeps most of the way to Jukoshtan; when he wakes and tries to get out of his seat, his legs collapse underneath him. One has become gnarled and wrinkled, and it aches with arthritis. The other is the smooth, hairless limb of an infant, far too thin to bear his weight.

Soon after, pale yellow buds are scattered up and down the stems. At length they bloom, smelling so sweet that they draw hummingbirds and insects from miles away until the air is thick with flitting wings.

A little girl plucks a single, still-closed bud from the vine and puts it in a glass of water on her bedside table. It opens in the night and whispers to her in a voice like rustling leaves, and she dreams strange and vivid dreams of birds that sang a thousand years ago in the jungle canopy above the spot where her bed now lies. She dreams of dead and pungent flesh that will rot into the topsoil a thousand years after she is dead and feed the roots of a young tree.

Time passes. The flowers wilt and fade as the seeds inside them ripen into fruit, full to bursting with sweetness. A young man picks one and eats it absently as he walks home. When he is done, his voice comes out in the clear soprano of a young boy.

All of which is certainly very odd, but by now oddities are commonplace. A plant growing where it shouldn’t, faster than it ought to, and doing unexpected things to those who pass by, is hardly the strangest thing to happen in Ahanashtan. Most residents of the city and most travelers passing through the station pay no attention to the mass of twisting vines growing up along the pavement. If they could see underneath it, they might think twice.

Because beneath the pavement the roots are digging deep. They dig through soil and clay, through concrete and rock. That is the gift of Ahanas. She is long dead, of course, but this is still her city, and she of all the Divinities knew how one body in death could give life to another.

Though the form and nature of this miracle belong to Ahanas, it owes a deeper debt to the daughter of Olvos and Talhaavras. When she gave her power away, a larger part than most must have settled here, because these roots dig deeper still. They dig through the dust of years and decades, through the blood and bone of centuries, and they do not let go.

********

Pitry sets his suitcase down, straightens his headcloth, and checks the time on the station clock. He’s almost certain the train should be here by now. “Excuse me,” he says to the burly, bearded Continental standing next to him. The man doesn’t reply, so Pitry clears his throat and tries again. “Excuse me. Are you waiting for the train to Bulikov?”

The man turns, or at least his huge wool overcoat shifts slightly in Pitry’s direction. Then he turns back. Maybe he’s hard of hearing. “I am going to Bulikov!” Pitry says, very loudly and very clearly. “I think the train is supposed to be leaving soon. Do you know—”

The man walks away.

Pitry deflates slightly. He’s been on the Continent a grand total of two days, just long enough to get his official assignment, and things are already a bit harder and unfriendlier than he was expecting. He didn’t mention that to his mother in the letter he sent this morning, of course. She’s been telling him for months that he should take a posting in Ghaladesh, which is at least close to home, and he doesn’t want her reply to start with _I told you so._

He looks around for the station porter and doesn’t see him. It’s almost dark, and the station is almost empty. There are a few people milling around at the far end of the platform—Continentals, mostly, none of whom are that interested in being helpful, and a Saypuri soldier who looked down her nose at him in either pity or disdain and said she had no idea when his train would arrive. Though at least she was willing to talk to him. He sighs.

Then he nearly jumps out of his skin, because there’s a young woman sitting on the ground next to him, and he has no idea how she got there. “Er—hello,” he says. “Are you waiting for a train?”

“No,” she says, but not in a discouraging tone. She’s very fair-skinned and dark-haired, with an oddly upturned nose. She is maybe a few years older than him, though he finds it hard to tell with Continentals. She also has a large smear of dirt across one cheek. She gets to her feet, and he sees in some confusion that her hands are full of bright green leaves. She sees him staring and drops the leaves, dusting her hands off. “Can you tell me where I am?”

Pitry is pleased both that she is willing to talk to him and that he has a ready answer. “At the train station.” He wants to ask about the leaves, but he thinks it might be rude.

“Yes, I can see that,” she says. “Which train station?”

He frowns. “Is there more than one?” If he’s at the wrong station, that would explain why his train hasn’t arrived yet.

“I mean,” she says, sounding as though she is trying very hard to be patient, “the train station in which city?”

“Oh!” says Pitry. “In Ahanashtan.”

The woman blinks at him, and her lips form the word _Ahanashtan_ mutely, as though she’s never heard it before. She turns to look across the platform—still empty, Pitry notes in resignation—and over the cityscape beyond. The grand facade of the Golden Hotel just across the street, the embassy building next door, and all around them the houses of Ahanashtan’s wealthier residents. In the other direction he can see stone tenements, most of them unlit even as dusk approaches because the residents can’t afford gas. Grey factories rise up behind to spew darker grey smoke up into the hazy, darkening sky. The black outline of what passes for skyscrapers on the Continent. And hidden behind those, he knows, is the gritty, squalid port where he made land two days ago, and beyond it lie the sea and Saypur. He tells himself he does not feel homesick.

“But this isn’t what Ahanashtan looks like,” the woman is saying. Then she stops as though she has realized something very important. Her mouth drops open. “Oh. Oh shit, you can’t be serious.”

Pitry wants to tell her he is perfectly serious, but she doesn’t seem to be talking to him. “If you don’t want to be in Ahanashtan, where are you trying to go?” he asks helpfully. “I’m waiting for the train to Bulikov. I think it’s supposed to be here by now, but—”

“I said, I’m not waiting for a train.”

“Then why are you at a train station?”

“Excellent fucking question,” she says. “I refer you to the Ministry of Miracles for the answer. Shit. I hope I can get home.” She sets her rather thin mouth in a determined line and drops back down to her knees. He notices at this point that there’s an odd bit of what looks like rope at her feet, sticking out of the concrete.

“What are you doing?” he asks, now thoroughly confused.

“Gardening,” she says. “Obviously.”

It’s at that point that he notices there are a few leaves attached to the thing he thought was rope, and he realizes it’s not rope at all, but part of an odd-looking plant. Pitry is trying to put a reasonable question together when he hears the long, low sound of a horn, then the growl of rattling wheels. He turns to watch a train—his train, he very much hopes—pull into the station. Smoke spews across the platform, and Pitry doubles over, coughing.

When he’s caught his breath and straightens again, he looks over his shoulder for the woman. She isn’t there. He spins around, looking to the other end of the platform where the Continentals who refused to talk to him are getting out their tickets and moving toward the nearest passenger car. No sign of her. She’s gone, as quickly and inexplicably as she arrived.

Pitry sighs, coughs again, and reaches to pick up his suitcase. His diplomatic career so far has been equal parts confusing and disheartening. Maybe things will be better in Bulikov.

********

If you went back in time and asked Ministry of Foreign Affairs operative Shara Komayd what she would crave most once she had become Prime Minister, thinks the Prime Minister, her answer would probably not have been “solitude”, yet here she is. Alone for what feels like the first time in weeks, in the finest suite of Ahanashtan’s Golden Hotel. She could be reviewing intelligence briefs or economic reports. Should probably be drafting yet another statement to the Saypuri press in an attempt to convince them this Continental tour does not mean she is abandoning them. Hells, she could call for a masseuse and do something about that ache that’s been sitting in the back of her skull since she returned from her visit to the refugee camps in Taalvashtan. But all she wants to do is sit quietly in a comfortable chair in a darkened room, her hands curled around a cup of slowly cooling tea, completely and utterly alone.

Which is why when she hears a crack, a thump, and a muffled curse from the bathroom that was most definitely empty when she left it an hour ago, her first thought it is not a sensible “Assassins! I must alert security,” but a querulous “Oh, damn, what is it now?”

Sense catches up with her, and she goes very still. She listens closely as whoever is in her bathroom gets to their feet and feels around in the dark. There is a click, and then a sliver of light streams from the edge of the half-open door across the marble floor of the bedroom. The cursing starts up again.

Whoever this is, they’re not being very discreet. Shara unfolds her feet from under her robe and slides them into her slippers. She pads silently across the room and peers around the edge of the door.

Inside she sees a woman, her head a mass of dark curls. She is down on her knees on the marble floor of the bathroom. When she looks up, the light falls across her face—young, and a pale-skinned Continental. She is not wearing the hotel uniform and does not look like staff. She also does not look like an assassin. She looks, Shara thinks, very tired and perhaps a bit irritated.

“Hello,” says Shara.

The young woman starts, looking toward the door. “Who’s there?”

Definitely not an assassin. Shara begins to be amused. “As this is my hotel room, I’m fairly certain I should be the one asking that question.” She steps into the bathroom and frowns down at the person on the floor. Yes, definitely Continental, and probably twenty-five years old at most. She’s dressed in a style Shara hasn’t seen before, neither Saypuri nor Continental: a narrow jacket with a pale scarf, and close-cut trousers with crisp lines. The look is spoilt by the dark, earthy stains that are ground into every piece of clothing she’s wearing. “How did you get past my security?”

The young woman doesn’t answer. The second she caught sight of Shara’s face, her mouth fell open, and now she is staring in utter shock. She has recognized her, of course. But is it possible that anyone could break into the Prime Minister’s hotel suite in the middle of the night without even knowing whose privacy she’s invading?

“How did you get in here?” Shara asks again.

The young woman closes her mouth and swallows. She looks deeply shaken. “I—was drawn here. From somewhere else.”

“Into my bathroom?”

“Yes,” says the young woman, her eyes wide. They’re strange, dark eyes set far apart in her face. Shara has been thinking she looks familiar—something in her posture, in the way she holds herself—but she thinks now that she couldn’t have seen her before, because Shara could never forget those eyes. The young woman draws a ragged breath. “I didn’t know you were here. I didn’t expect—” Her voice cracks.

“That is tolerably obvious,” Shara says. She steps forward, frowning, and stares at the thing emerging from a crack in the marble underneath the great claw-foot bathtub. “Is that a _plant_ growing out of the floor?”

“Yes,” says the young woman.

“Well,” Shara says, “that’s a new one.” And she goes to examine it.

Her joints aren’t what they used to be, so instead of kneeling she sits on the edge of the bathtub and leans over to examine the vine growing through the floor. The marble is cracked around it as though it has pushed its way straight up through several floors of the hotel. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“It’s something new,” says the young woman. She still sounds vaguely stunned. “Or something old. It’s gotten hard to tell the difference.”

Her accent is interesting, more Ghaladeshi than Continental, with a heavy overlay Shara has not heard in years. “Tell me,” Shara says, “how a Continental by way of the Dreyling Republics and a plant of Divine origin come to be in my hotel bathroom.”

The young woman brings one grubby hand up to touch the bridge of her nose as though to push up her glasses, except she’s not wearing any. Shara’s own hand twitches as though it would like to do the same. “May I borrow your watch?” she asks. “It would be easier to show you.”

Shara unstraps the watch from her wrist and hands it over, then observes with bemusement as the young woman holds it near the crack in the marble with one hand and grips the root of the vine with the other. She gives a few sharp tugs.

“What—” Shara begins.

She turns the face of the watch toward Shara. “Look at the hands.”

Shara moves closer. It is a few minutes past midnight. The young woman gives another tug, then twists the root, and the second hand of the watch stops. The air stills around them.

Then the second hand twitches once. And begins to tick backward.

Shara chokes.

The young woman lets go of the vine, and the world rights itself.

Shara stares, leaning in until they are both bent over the watch face. “This plant…it has properties that interfere with mechanics in some way?” That is the wrong answer, she knows before it comes out of her mouth, but it is the more comfortable possibility. She looks at the young woman, uncertain whether she is hoping for confirmation or correction, and finds her watching Shara with the most extraordinary expression on her face, as though she is desperately happy and desperately sad at the same time. “What is it?”

She reaches out to push back a strand of hair that has fallen into Shara’s eyes. Her fingertips brush Shara’s cheek, soft and cool and smelling of fresh soil. “You look so young,” she says, voice trembling.

Shara wants to laugh. She does not feel young; the hair now tucked behind her ear is heavily peppered with grey, her bones ache worse every morning, and if this Continental tour is teaching her anything it is that nothing she has done has mattered at all. She feels so very old. “Who are you?” she asks.

“I could give you at least three different answers,” says the young woman, “but I don’t think you’d believe any of them.”

Shara finds herself smiling a little. “We can start with a name.”

“Tatyana,” she says, and promptly bursts into tears.

Shara jerks back in alarm.

“I’m sorry,” Tatyana sobs. “I’m sorry. I’m just so tired and I want to go home, and I don’t know if I can—and now _you’re_ here and you won’t even _remember_ this when I’ve left—” She drops Shara’s watch to the bathroom floor and scrubs ineffectually at her face.

Shara knows she should call for security. It may be arrogant of her, and she may well have grown soft in the years since she was an operative, but she is still reasonably certain she is as capable of dealing with a Divine threat as any of the soldiers standing guard outside her hotel room door. And it may be foolish of her, but she does not see a threat here. She makes a decision.

“Are you hungry?” she asks.

Tatyana stares at her through reddened eyes. “What?”

“I’m hungry,” says Shara. It is true, somewhat to her surprise. “Do you like roti?”

Shara is pleased to find she can move as quickly and quietly now as when she was running operations. They slip into the back hallway without alerting the guards posted outside her suite, then into the drab service stairwell.

“How did you know this was here?” Tatyana asks as they descend the stairs.

“I ran operations out of Ahanashtan for over a decade,” Shara says, checking the floor number at the next landing. “Occasionally I did some of the footwork myself. Everyone with who could afford it stayed at the Golden Hotel, and that meant that I spent quite a lot of time here, what with one thing and another. Ah, here we are.”

The hotel is down to the overnight staff, and the restaurant has been closed for hours, so they have the place to themselves. Tatyana still looks a little worse for wear, so Shara gets her a glass of water before she does anything else. Then she begins to search through the cabinets and lay out the implements she needs: a huge steel pan, a cast-iron skillet, a series of knives that range from a dicer as big as her thumb to a cleaver the length of her forearm. She salts a pot of water and puts it on to boil, then starts assembling the ingredients.

The spices come first. She uses cumin and ground coriander, curry and a bit of cinnamon. She shakes them straight out of the jars into a bowl, gauging quantities by look and feel. All the while Tatyana watches her every movement with a hunger that looks like it goes much deeper than her stomach.

Shara raids the walk-in refrigerator for a pound of chicken thighs. By the time she has converted the meat to a neat stack of pink cubes, Tatyana is on her feet. Shara glances over to find her bent over a cutting board, rapidly and methodically reducing each onion to a fragrant mound of white. Shara approves of her economical movements. Someone has taught her well.

“I used to cook when I was angry,” she says, washing the sticky residue of raw poultry from her hands.

Tatyana’s flashing knife pauses. “When you were angry?”

Shara makes a small noise of assent and starts mixing the roti dough. “It gave my hands something to do while I processed a situation, I suppose. And it’s an excuse for very focused physical violence.”

Tatyana laughs aloud, then looks startled at the sound. “I never thought of it that way.”

“And then there were the smells,” Shara adds. “They reminded me of home. I used to find that motivating.”

“And are you angry now?”

“No,” says Shara. “I haven’t cooked like that in a long time. I haven’t cooked _for_ anyone in a long time, either. When you are Prime Minister of Saypur, that’s not the sort of dinner party you are expected to host.”

As she kneads the dough she and watches Tatyana finish the onions out of the corner of her eye. The young woman moves on to the potatoes without hesitation, peeling long strips of grayish brown from the pocked and starchy flesh, dicing them into large pieces, and sliding them into the now-boiling pot of water. A stack of carrots falls apart into thin, neat discs. Then she sets the pan on the stove and tips in a golden stream of sunflower oil. At a touch, the burner bursts into blue and yellow flame.

She catches Shara watching her. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m processing,” Shara says.

Tatyana runs her hand under the sink and flicks a few drops of water onto the pan. When the pan is hot enough for them to pop and sizzle, she tips in the sliced carrots. “Fact,” she says without preamble. “A complete stranger has appeared uninvited in your hotel room.”

Shara blinks.

“Along with her came a plant that cannot possibly have grown there, which has some distinctly odd properties.”

Shara reaches for the wooden spoon lying beside the stove and begins to stir the carrots. Tatyana adds the onion without needing to be asked, and the heady scent of aromatics begins to waft from the pan. “It would appear,” Shara says slowly, “that there is Divine influence at work. Only one of the Divinities was known for bestowing her blessings on flora rather than fauna. But Ahanas is most definitely dead, or this city would be a very different place.”

“True. Conclusion?”

“Just as you said before,” Shara says, “this is something new, or something very, very old. The chicken now, I think.”

She hands Tatyana the spoon as the meat begins to brown, checking that the potatoes are tender enough to mash. “Fact,” Shara continues, tossing diced chilis into the bowl. “Taalhavras was the Divinity particularly concerned with time. Ah, thank you.” Shara has almost forgotten the garlic, but Tatyana hands it to her at just the right moment to add it to the mix. “It is time that's affected, yes? What does that thing do, exactly?”

“The vines can—twist time, I suppose, for people and things in close proximity.” Tatyana adds stock to the pan and sets it to simmer. “Usually in very small ways. Sometimes in larger ones. At first it didn’t cause so many problems, but you let any weed grow unchecked—”

Shara can well imagine. “I expect Jukov would have enjoyed working mischief with that sort of Divine influence, but to my knowledge he never had that particular capacity. And of course Taalhavras has been dead for over eighty years, and I killed Jukov myself.” Tatyana has started to separate the roti dough, spooning in bits of the mashed potato mixture and folding the dough over the top. She rolls them out into round cakes on the countertop, just a little thicker than Shara usually makes them. “Whatever this is, it is not only very old or very new, but it does not bear the mark of any Divinity whose miracles ought to work at all.”

“The prevailing theory,” Tatyana says, “is that Divine energy holds some degree of long-term memory, and that memory tends to be tied very tightly to its place of origin. So Ahanas might be dead, but this is still her city, and any Miracle performed here will know that and respond accordingly.”

“Interesting,” Shara says. “Are you a historian? A theorist of Divine behavior?”

“No,” says Tatyana firmly. “I’m an engineer.” At Shara’s look of surprise, she sets her chin. “I deal with things as they are, in and of themselves. Not as any Divinity would make them.”

“Interesting,” Shara says again. “After the example of Vallaicha Thinadeshi.”

“After the example of Signe Harkvaldsson,” Tatyana corrects her.

"Ah." This, too, is interesting. “And you have a side business in Divine horticulture.”

Tatyana lets out another, slightly hoarse laugh. “Hardly. I was summoned to clear up this—infestation—by the Ministry of Miracles. By the Minister herself, actually. She said it was my fault in the first place that she hadn’t retired ages ago, and so I owed her one. But she swore a lot more than that when she said it.”

Shara would like to pursue this line of questioning, but the crackle of oil on the skillet as they fry the roti is too loud for easy conversation. They both retreat into their thoughts until the meal is ready. Shara offers Tatyana the plate of flatbread and watches as she tears in.

Despite her own hunger, Shara eats slowly. A little too much coriander, she thinks. Or is it the cumin? She is out of practice. Well, it seems unlikely she will have time to do anything about that as long as she is Prime Minister. Which may not be much longer, what with one thing and another, but that is a problem for tomorrow.

“If I accept that the plant growing through my bathroom floor has the ability to alter the passage of time time,” Shara says when she is finished, “and if I accept that you were sent here by a branch of my government that does not, so far as I know, exist, I’m forced to consider the possibility that the question I should be asking you is not where you came from, but when.”

Tatyana is sopping up curry sauce with the last of her roti. “I wasn’t sure you’d believe that if I just told you. I thought you might believe it if you worked it out yourself.”

“Fact,” Shara says, very deliberately. “I learned this recipe from a fellow operative in Ahanashtan several decades ago, shortly before he died. He liked to incorporate Continental ingredients into Saypuri dishes. Hence the potato. That isn’t conclusive, but it is at least suggestive that you also know it.”

Tatyana says nothing.

“Fact,” Shara continues. “You knew I could talk myself around to believing something unbelievable, and you led me down that path by mimicking my own thought processes. Conclusion—you know me, don’t you? You know me very well.”

Tatyana ducks her head, the mass of curls falling in front of her face. “You haven’t even met me yet.”

“But I will.” Tatyana nods. “When we were upstairs, you said I wouldn’t remember this once you left. Why did you say that?”

“That’s how it works, or how it used to. I haven’t done this sort of thing for a long time, either. Whenever I met someone and—and _changed_ anything—they never remembered it afterward. Except for Sigrud.”

"You know Sigrud, too?” Shara supposes she should have expected that. “Well, even if I won’t remember—tell me one thing. This work I’ve been doing. Everything we’re trying to accomplish for the Continent. Will it achieve anything?”

“Yes,” Tatyana says instantly. “Yes.”

“Ah,” says Shara, and a weight slips from her shoulders. “Thank you. That’s very good to know.”

“Not—not in the way you hoped it would, though. Definitely not the way you expected.”

Shara smiles at her from across the table. “No matter,” she says. “That’s nothing new.”

********

The woman who still prefers to be called Tatyana yanks and twists at the vines in her hand. When she was much younger, she tended a vegetable patch with her Auntie Ivanya, and she feels as though this ought to be similar to clearing a stubborn patch of weeds. It is not at all the same. Easier on the one hand, because it should be impossible for her to pull roots out through concrete or marble, and yet she can, because the vines aren’t really buried in the physical world. And harder on the other hand, because she has to let go of her present self to grip them properly. It feels a little like crossing her eyes. It gives her a terrible headache.

All the while, every time she stops for a rest, she feels the pull of the people around her. None of them know who she is. Few even take notice of her as she stoops over the pavement and clambers over walls, searching for the last living bits of vine and flower, hoping that once she’s finished she will be returned to her own time. Only the people who see her appear out of midair really stop and look. Even then she just has to tear up another length of root to be gone in the blink of an eye, moving forward another ten years or back another twenty.

Whether or not they see her, these people call to her. They don’t even know they’re doing it. As they go about about their lives, taking every second and minute and hour in the expected order and at the expected pace, their beliefs tug at her until she thinks she might be pulled apart like the vines she has come to remove.

She gives another great tug to loose a long section of the root. It comes harder than she expects, and she falls flat on her backside. She rubs her bottom, cursing. Then she looks up, notices her surroundings, and gapes.

This is not the Ahanashtan of the present day, remade into the new gateway to the Continent with its arms flung wide to welcome all who wish to taste the Divine. It is not the sleek, modern Ahanashtan of her childhood with the aero-tram stretching high in to the sky, pointing the way toward Bulikov. Nor is it the run-down setting of her mother’s career as a young operative, or the war-torn port through which thousands upon thousands of Saypuri soldiers were funneled on their way to the Summer of Black Rivers.

This city breathes.

It is well after dark, judging by the rich black of the sky, but the scene before her is lit like broad daylight. People—Continentals like her, she thinks, but with deeply tanned skin—walk past in loose shifts of silk and linen that twine about their limbs like living fabric. Their way is lit by great, shining globes that hang like fruit from slender trees. The space that just moments before (just a hundred years later) was a paved street is now a shallow, gurgling stream.

Tatyana watches in fascination as the man next to her walks unconcernedly through the water. The stream parts before him with every step, and he never seems to get wet. She, meanwhile, is soaked to the ankles. She notices that everyone else seems to be barefoot and shucks off her sodden, muddy boots.

The moment her naked toes touch the surface of the water, the current shifts. The sole of her foot comes to rest on a smooth, flat surface that has just a little give to it—damp, packed clay. It cradles her with surprising warmth. She digs her toes in a little farther, and they touch something rough, slimy, and somehow very familiar.

Tatyana sighs and begins to bend down.

"Are you sure you’re ready?”

She looks up in surprise. One of the people walking by her has stopped: a short, stoutly built woman, bare-chested, wearing a long skirt of pine needles. The stream eddies around her.

“Oh,” says Tatyana. Says Sempros. “It’s you.”

“It is,” says the mother she does not remember. “I am so very glad to see you, child.”

“I wish I could say the same.”

Olvos frowns repressively. “Don’t be petulant.”

“I don’t think you have any right to scold me,” says the daughter she allowed to be torn in two. “Am I sure I’m ready for what?”

“That’s the last of it,” Olvos says, gesturing down at their feet. “Do you really want to be done with this?”

“Yes.”

“You’re certain?”

“I want to go home,” says Tatyana. “I want to tell fucking Mulaghesh—sorry, _Minister_ fucking Mulaghesh—what she can do with her duty and service and favors owed. I want to get on the first ship heading north and see Hild and Ivanya and get back to my work. My real work.” She loves it fiercely, far more than the economics Shara once encouraged her to pursue. It uses all her hard-won grasp of mathematics but none of the innate talent for forecasting that she gave up that day in Bulikov.

“Why is that?” asks Olvos. “Once you know what else there is—when you’ve seen what was and could be again—” Her gesture takes in all of Ahanashtan, the living city. “You know you could change the world with a stray thought.”

“I’d rather not,” Tatyana says. “Miracles, stray thoughts, they’re all very well and good, but I want to work with something real. Where I came from—when I came from—the Divine is commonplace, but there’s still virtue in being able to explain how something works. To describe the world as it is, not as it was or could be. And,” she adds, trying very hard _not_ to be petulant, “I want to go home.”

Olvos smiles, only a little sadly. “And so you will. You’ve chosen better than most would, you know.” She steps in and presses a kiss to Tatyana’s forehead. It burns there for a moment like a brand, then fades.

“All right,” says her daughter. “All right.” She takes one last look up at the velvet night sky of Ahanashtan-that-was, reaches down into the earth, and pulls.


End file.
